Christians have come to presume that
teachers and authors who profess to speak and write out of a calling from the
Holy Spirit will present a message that is doctrinally sound and consistent from
sermon to sermon and book to book. However, anyone who has watched the Christian
Charismatic scene over the past several years knows that such a presumption is
dangerous and often will fail to be borne out.

Joyce Meyer, a rising star on the
Charismatic horizon with a weekly program on cable TV and the Trinity
Broadcasting Network and a new book, The Word, The Name, The Blood, is
the latest example.

The dust jacket of her latest book
highlights her prominence and promises big things:

“Joyce Meyer is the author of the
best-sellers, Beauty for Ashes, The Root of Rejection and
Battlefield of The Mind, and has taught on emotional healing and
related subjects in meetings all over the country. Her ‘Life in The Word’
radio broadcast is aired on 200 stations nationwide. Her thirty-minute ‘Life
in The Word With Joyce Meyer’ television program is broadcast throughout the
United States and Canada. She also travels extensively conducting Life in The
Word conferences, as well as speaking in local
churches.”

Such prominence might suggest that Meyer
has a firm grip on what she believes. However, by her own admission, her
teachings are evolving. A review of her weekly program and tapes reveals that
her preaching style, though folksy-sounding, is strident, authoritarian, and
aggressive. There is no uncertainty in her pulpit manners, just a tone of
knowing it all. An excerpt from one of her tapes goes as
follows:

“You know something? I liked myself
before I had started studying on this because that’s something God had just
worked in me the last seven years. And I didn’t start out liking myself. I
didn’t like myself at all. But I’m telling you after I’ve studied this
message, I’m so excited about me that I hardly know what to
do.”

Still, her current book reveals a
startlingly different attitude:

“Several years ago I found myself
completely worn out from trying to fight the devil. I learned many ‘methods’
of spiritual warfare; however, they did not seem to be working ... I had
fallen into the trap that many Christians fall into. I had the right teaching,
but the wrong order ... I was feverishly applying methods I had learned — like
fasting and prayer ... rebuking and resisting evil spirits ... empty formulas
which wear us out and produce no results except maybe a sore throat” (The
Word, The Name, The Blood, pp. 28, 32, 33).

Such uncertainty by the teacher can only
foster uncertainty in any discerning student or would-be
student.

ATONEMENT
AMBIGUITIES

Meyer can be classified as a Word-Faith
teacher and as such has shown an inclination to waffle on major doctrines. In
her 1991 booklet, The Most Important Decision You Will Ever Make, an
evangelistic work aimed at nonbelievers, she resounds the Word-Faith view of
Christ’s atonement:

“During that time He entered hell, where
you and I deserved to go (legally) because of our sin. He paid the price there
... no plan was too extreme ... Jesus paid on the cross and in hell”
(pg. 35, underlining in the original).

“God rose up from His throne and said to
demon powers tormenting the sinless Son of God, ‘Let Him go.’ Then the
resurrection power of Almighty God went through hell and filled Jesus ... He
was resurrected from the dead — the first born-again man” (pg. 36,
underlining in the original).

“His spirit went to hell because that is
where we deserved to go. Remember in the very beginning of this, I said, ‘When
you die, only your body dies. The rest of you, your soul and spirit, goes
either to heaven or hell’” (ibid.).

“There is no hope of anyone going to
heaven unless they believe this truth I am presenting. You cannot go to heaven
unless you believe with all your heart that Jesus took your place in hell”
(ibid.).

“Jesus went to hell for you” (pg.
38, underlining in the original).

All of the above citations are from her
chapter entitled, “What Should You Believe?”. The first subheading in this
chapter is “What Happened on the Cross?”. Those familiar with Word-Faith
vernacular will recall Kenneth Copeland’s 1984 tape, “What Happened From the
Cross to the Throne.” Copeland apparently borrowed the title and theme from E.W.
Kenyon’s book by the same name.

Meyer teaches the classic “Born-Again
Jesus” gospel that has been taught by Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, Fred Price, John
Jacobs, Charles Capps, Benny Hinn and Jan Crouch, to name a few. It’s usually
presented under the guise of “revelation knowledge,” given by the Holy Spirit
and grounded in Scripture. However, this gospel does not stand up under biblical
scrutiny.

Charismatics many times will make their
case by saying, “Jesus went to hell. Doesn’t it say so somewhere in the book of
Acts?”

While it is true that Jesus went to hell
(Ephesians 4:8-9; 1 Peter 3:18), attention should be focused on what He did or
didn’t do there. Meyer and her kind teach that Jesus went there to pay for our
sins, it’s the same kind of payment — or better — that He made on the
cross.

The reader is asked to recall
Meyer’s repeated declarations: “He paid the price there ... Jesus paid on
the cross and in hell ... Jesus took your place in hell ... Jesus went to hell
for you.”

Every cult and pseudo-Christian sect
disparages the cross. An enemy of the cross is one who even suggests that Jesus
Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was insufficient for salvation. Anyone who
disparages the cross is teaching another gospel. The destiny of such teachers is
destruction (Philippians 3:19). Based upon Christ’s atonement for their sins,
Christians are not going to hell. Therefore, no enemy of the cross can be a
brother in Christ.

A pastor at whose church Meyer was to
speak told her about serious concerns he had about her booklet. As a result, she
has revised parts of it. Meyer’s organization labeled the revised booklet
“Second Printing - May 1993” but did not mention the key theological revisions,
which were limited to Chapter Four, where the previously cited passages are
found. Nevertheless, the revisions leave much of the “Born-Again Jesus” doctrine
intact. Apparently she has neither tried to disavow or recall the first edition
nor has she made any mention of the revisions in the second
printing.

Her now-unavailable tape, “What Happened
from the Cross to The Throne?” continued to teach the “Born-Again Jesus”
doctrine and is a close, if not identical, copy of the Kenyon/Copeland theme and
title.

In it she stated that at age 36, she
received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and sometime later felt a flipping and a
turning in her stomach. This, she said, led to an understanding of her
justification and a deeper revelation of Jesus’ spirit death in hell, where He
became sin and was tormented by demons. She also states that when “God yelled
down through the universe, ‘That’s enough. Let Him loose,’” Jesus was able to
rise. She admits this understanding does not come from the Bible, saying it came
from our spirit man. Most likely it came from the likes of Kenneth Copeland and
Kenneth Hagin.

Meyer also declared on the tape that she
no longer is a sinner:

“I’m going to tell you something folks,
I didn’t stop sinning until I finally got it through my thick head I wasn’t a
sinner anymore. And the religious world thinks that’s heresy and they want to
hang you for it. But the Bible says that I’m righteous and I can’t be
righteous and be a sinner at the same time ... All I was ever taught to say
was, ‘I’m a poor, miserable sinner.’ I am not poor, I am not miserable and I
am not a sinner. That is a lie from the pit of hell. That is what I was and if
I still am then Jesus died in vain. Amen?”

The Apostle John says, “If we claim to be
without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). It
is Christ’s righteousness imparted to us, not ours, that makes us
righteous.

Meyer further adopted the grammatical
subterfuge of used by annihilationists in her exegesis of Luke
23:43:

“And in Luke 23:43, Jesus said unto him,
‘I say unto you today you shall be in paradise with me.’ There’s no
punctuation in the original translations of the Bible. We have punctuated it
and in this particular Scripture it was punctuated wrong. They put in there:
‘I say unto you comma today you shall be in paradise with me’ making it appear
that the minute Jesus died on the cross He went straight to paradise. No, no
no. He did not. The way it should read is: ‘I say unto you today comma. I’m
telling you today. Today I’m telling you that you are going to be in paradise
with me.’ But He didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be there today.’ He said, ‘I’m
telling you this today’” (ibid.).

Thus Meyer has subscribed to the idea that
modern Bible translations are wrong in quoting Christ: “I tell you the truth,
today you will be with me in paradise.” Meyer’s reading makes way for the union
to be some future event. However, there would have been no need for Christ to
have said, “I say to you today,” since the dying man already knew it was
today.

PFO wrote to Meyer and asked if the
message and theology of the cassette were still valid. PFO director Kurt
Goedelman received a call from a representative of Meyer’s ministry named Paula.
Paula told PFO that the tape had been deleted from the ministry’s
catalog.

PFO was told that because of Meyer’s
progression in “revelation knowledge,” the message is obsolete and that her
latest book is an accurate reflection of her current beliefs. Paula, however,
was unable to confirm or deny if Meyer still subscribed to the gospel of the
“Born-Again Jesus.”

WORD
WIZARDRY

Meyer, in her new book, writes, “Words are
containers for power” (The Name, The Word, The Blood, pg. 37). Word-Faith
teachers advocate that through speaking and positive affirmations we can create
our own reality. They usually refer to Genesis 1 and show that God spoke the
world into existence and extrapolate that we, too, can speak creative words and
can speak reality into existence.

The fact that the premise breaks down
because we are not God does not deter Meyer from saying, “Remember then, that
the Word of God is both spirit and life, use wisdom and begin speaking life to
your situation” (ibid., pg. 38).

NAME
NONSENSE

When it comes to the “Name” of Jesus,
Meyer admits that she used the “name” for many years without “results” (ibid.,
pg. 47). This suggests we can learn how to use the “name” to obtain results.
What follows is a mix of truth and error. Some of what she says about praying in
the name of Jesus and about His name being a term for His authority is proper.
At various points she lapses and transfers all the authority of Jesus directly
to the believer.

Christians pray in Jesus’ name and have
access to heaven through Jesus but it is not true that we, just by use of that
name, have “authority over demons, sickness, disease, lack and every form of
misery” (ibid., pg. 70). It confuses the believer with Jesus and reduces His
name to a magic word. The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible
reminds us, “The name here is His person and the belief in that name is not
magical but it is an acceptance or receiving of His messianic person and mission
and thereby acquiring the right to enter a new relationship with the heavenly
Father, John 1:12” (Vol. IV, pg. 365).

The New Testament believers saw the name
of Jesus as standing for all He is and all He accomplished. To believe in His
name was to believe in Him and His messianic mission. To speak in His name was
to speak with His authority but there is no hint of name magic in the New
Testament.

If we presume to speak in the name of
Jesus, we should be sure that we represent the name, character and attributes of
that One or we surely take His name in vain. A police officer can speak “in the
name of the law.” However he cannot command what the law forbids. Anything we
say or do in the name of Jesus must be regulated by the commands and directives
of Scripture.

BLOOD
BALLYHOO

In Scripture, blood usually stands for
life poured out. Jesus Himself said, “The good Shepherd lays down His life for
the sheep” (John 10:11). Christ’s shed blood stands for all the merits secured
by His death and the riches of His grace given because of His death and
resurrection. We focus on Him and the great riches of our salvation, not the red
fluid.

On the other hand, Meyer’s teaching on
Christ’s blood and how to “use” it is essentially a repeat of her teaching on
how to “use” Jesus’ name, along with a repeat of many of the same doctrinal
errors. Though Meyer says some things that are right about the blood of Christ,
she lapses into a magical use of the word “blood” much like the relic system and
fetish worship of the Middle Ages. For example, she writes, “One of the ways we
can honor the blood is by singing about it, talking about it, studying about it
and meditating on it” (pg. 100).

Consider these further
statements:

“I know the devil is afraid of the
blood” (ibid., pg. 101).

“We must learn to ‘use’ the blood”
(ibid., pg. 109).

“My husband and I stay in various hotels
because of our travels in ministry. Quite frequently when unpacking and
settling into a hotel room I will ‘plead’ the blood or ‘put’ the blood on the
room, to cleanse or remove any wrong spirits that may be there from other
guests. I do this by praying, by speaking the blood in my prayer” (ibid., pg.
111).

“We laid hands on the check and prayed.
I went and got all of our checkbooks and my pocketbook and Dave got his wallet
and we laid hands on them and put the blood on them, asking God to protect our
money, to cause it to multiply and to see to it that Satan could not steal any
of it from us” (ibid.).

“If you are sick in your body, plead the
blood over your body. The life is in the blood; it can drive out the death of
sickness” (ibid.).

First Peter 2:24 and Isaiah 53:5 speak of
being saved by the “stripes” of Jesus, yet Meyer does not speak the stripes,
which carry the same connotation of life being poured out.

Church hymnology is highly poetic and
allegorical. It is understood as that whether we sing about “Beulah land,” “the
name of Jesus,” or “power in the blood,” the lyrics bring theological truths of
salvation and redemption into view. Hymns and even Bible passages that speak of
being saved by the cross are not interpreted to say a hunk of wood has any power
to save.

Most evangelical commentaries and scholars
agree that the idea of Christ’s blood is the conveying of an expiatory offering,
a propitiatory sacrifice (see Barnes Notes on The New Testament, pp.
572-573). Throughout Scripture Christ’s blood is equivalent to His death, His
sacrifice, His redemption, His atonement for sin. The literal blood of Jesus
that spattered on the Roman soldiers as they scourged His body and nailed His
hands and feet did not magically save them.

Hebrews 9-10 clearly states that we are
saved by Christ’s body, which is called His death and sacrifice. It is also true
in those chapters that we are said to be saved by Christ’s blood, by Christ’s
offering and by Christ’s flesh. All these words are roughly equivalent and point
to the grand theme of atonement.

We do not make a fetish out of any of
these words or use them in ritual incantation or in an empty, repetitive
manner.

Meyer’s evolving, changing Word-Faith
views are at best aberrant, confusing, misleading and unscriptural. Magic words,
magic names and magic blood should be deplored and seen for what they are:
superstition.

RESPONSE TO
REVIEW

The fall 1994 issue of the Christian
Sentinel, the newsletter of Eastern Christian Outreach, reviewed the
doctrine and practice of Meyer based upon her series of speaking engagements in
the Philadelphia area. Jackie Alnor reported that Meyer’s methodology during the
visit to the city was patterned after the “laughing” spectacles of Rodney
Howard-Browne.

In a cassette tape titled, “Like a Mighty
Wind,” Meyer responded to the Sentinel’s criticism:

“It amazes me, and not only does it
amaze me, it aggravates me. These people who think they’ve got a ministry of
exposing what’s wrong with everybody else ... Man, I just got written up in a
newspaper in Philadelphia ... they mention in this one article, they mention
about 5 or 6 or 7 national ministries. I got my own column. Had my own little
column in there, telling how I came to the city and I manipulated the people
and I did this and that and something else. Oh garbage, garbage, garbage! Why
is it that people think that it’s their call to go around and find out what’s
wrong with everybody else and print it? Do you know when people were trying to
stop Jesus, finally, some very wise man said, ‘Why don’t you just leave us
alone? If it’s of God, you’re not gonna stop it. And if it’s not God, it won’t
last too long anyway.’ Hallelujah! I mean, that’s just the way I feel about
it.”

Meyer’s incorrect citation of a speech by
the rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-40) is a typical Charismatic reply to evaluations
directed toward extremes within the movement. Only months before,
Charisma magazine editor Stephen Strang offered the same logic in an
editorial about concerns over Rodney Howard-Browne (August 1994, pg.
102).

A recent article appearing in Banner
Ministries’ Mainstream newsletter debunked the use of Gamaliel’s
advice:

“[Gamaliel] concludes that a genuine
work of God will succeed, but a religion of human origin will fail. Gamaliel’s
logic is seriously flawed because he allows for only two possible sources or
explanations for these religious movements — Human or Divine. But there is a
third source of which he is ignorant, precisely because it had most likely
inspired him to make this very deduction. The Scriptures warn of demonic or
Satanic origin to much counterfeit religious belief and even miraculous
phenomena. Using Gamaliel’s logic, we would have to conclude that religions
such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and modern cults such as the Mormons,
Baha’i and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are all inspired by God because they have
not ‘failed’. Communist persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Islamic
intolerance of the Baha’i faith did not crush them ... Gamaliel therefore is
not a model of godly wisdom that Christians should emulate. His counsel, both
in terms of what he advised the Sanhedrin to do and believe, was seriously
flawed and most likely inspired by Satan” (Spring 1995, pg. 10, emphasis in
original).

Meyer’s citation of the passage also makes
it sound as if Gamaliel had been a part of the early Church. Meyer says,
“Finally, some very wise man said, ‘Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
However, the clear Word of God states: “Therefore, in the present case, I advise
you: Leave these men alone” (Acts 5:38).

Meyer’s writings and tapes continue to
lack solid biblical exposition. Yet perhaps next month, next year, or the year
after she will have again changed her teachings and be spreading different
errors and “revelations.” Scripture is clear: We are to avoid those who are
devoid of sound doctrine and are like wandering stars (Jude
12-13).